ROGER KIMBALL GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is no martyr.

As the indignant clamor of Judge Wilkinson’s rhetoric suggests, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has afforded plenty of opportunities for high dudgeon. “Trump has let his inner Hitler off the leash! He is a threat to our cherished constitutional order!” The volume on both sides has been cranked up to eleven. Trump could usefully dial things back. He is famed for “the art of the deal.” He should bring that skill to this controversy and defuse the situation.

The Dems have seized upon Garcia as a martyr-in-waiting: a moral life jacket whose buoyancy they are counting on to save them. It won’t work. The suggestion that Senator Chris Van Hollen was sipping margaritas with Garcia in El Salvador was custom-made for next season’s GOP attack ads.

As commentator Ann Coulter observed, he has locked up the “face tattoo vote.” The public at large, however, is not smiling. Van Hollen and other members of the canonization committee for Garcia have made a strategic political error described in the late 1960s by the political scientist James Q. Wilson: they have confused their audience – the media and other repositories of correct opinion – with their constituency, the people eligible to vote for them.

A friend observes: they are like a school of dolphins whose ability to navigate by echolocation has been scrambled. Having lost the thread, they are about to beach themselves, there to heave and shudder in impotent, out-of-office irrelevance.

Trump aide Stephen Miller made the DNC-MSM an offer they’ll never accept this week:

“Each and every one of you that sides over and over again with MS-13 terrorists…choose to live in condos or homes or houses as far away from these kinds of gangbangers as you possibly can.”

“If I offered any one of you a rent free home with no taxes to pay in any of these gang neighborhoods, and I said, your neighbors are MS-13 terrorists, or Mexican Mafia, or Sinaloa Cartel or Tren de Aragua, I couldn’t pay you to live there!”

“But yet you, with your coverage, are trying to force innocent Americans to have these people as their neighbors and that one day their daughter may be abducted from their home and raped and murdered!”

Martha Raddatz could not be reached to see if she would take up Miller’s offer.